Welcome to the most recent issue of IMPACT, an e-newsletter highlighting research, scholarship, and graduate education at the University of Vermont. 

Cindy Forehand, Dean of the Graduate College, and Vice President for Research, Kirk Dombrowski, invite you to peruse the sections of this newsletter, which spotlight students, alumni, programs, and recent activities.

Dean Forehand's and VP Dombrowski's offices have been hubs of activity. The Graduate College has been busy with the fall start, transitioning an existing house to graduate housing, welcoming a record number of international graduate students, and kicking off the University Scholar and student awards cycles. After setting a record for attracting research funding, Vice President Dombrowski and his staff continue to work diligently to expand UVM's grant funding and research activities. A recent Seven Days article highlights Vice President Dombrowski's successes, strategies, and goals for transforming not only UVM's research community but the broader community as well.

Please enjoy this edition of the newsletter! 

The UVM Graduate Student Senate (GSS) executive board (e-board) members kicked off the academic year with the annual BBQ at North Beach Park—flipping burgers and grilling hot dogs for over 200 graduate students to enjoy. Following on the heels of this event was the Graduate Resource Fair that set a record for attendance and featured more than 30 local businesses and organizations, raffle gifts, and free pizza. Following these kick-off events, GSS organized several other social events for UVM graduate students, including apple picking, leaf peeping, a corn maze event, and multiple coffee breaks. Recently, GSS collaborated with newly re-opened Merrill’s Roxy Cinema to provide discounted tickets to UVM graduate students who were more than happy to see movies on a big screen again. One of GSS’ most-anticipated social events of the year, Karaoke Night, is scheduled for December.    

All members of GSS work hard to ensure that UVM graduate students have an integrative experience and ample opportunities to connect with their fellow university friends through social events. A few weeks ago, GSS received an email from Laura Engelken, Director of the Interfaith Center, which underscored the importance of GSS events saying “... Your efforts make such a huge difference in helping folks feel grounded and connected in the midst of their graduate experience.” Messages like these are a tremendous source of motivation for GSS e-board members.     

(By Irfan Tahir)

Recent activities of UVM's Postdoc Association (PDA) have included Postdoc Appreciation Week, several virtual professional development workshops, and an outdoor coffee hour. The coffee event had terrific turnout and was a reminder of just how valuable time spent together can be, even if it’s just to share a coffee. Attendees included several new postdocs from various departments, including PDA's newest officer, Anil Lalwani, who is serving as postdoc-at-large. This was a great opportunity for PDA member to meet new people and form connections, but more than that, it served as a reminder that UVM's postdoc community has grown in spite of the pandemic. 

After a difficult year and a half, the arrival of new postdocs on campus gives everyone a sense of renewal and optimism—not only for the community of postdocs, but for UVM’s research programs as a whole. Bringing new postdocs on campus is an essential part of growing research at UVM. Postdocs bring with them the experiences and expertise they acquired in their previous graduate work, making them a unique research asset and an invaluable resource for graduate students. As UVM looks to raise its research profile, expanding the presence of postdocs will help accomplish this. The Office of the Vice President for Research has shown a great deal of support for faculty looking to hire new postdocs. The PDA hopes to see these programs continue—and expand—as the University and its postdocs work towards raising UVM's research profile.

Mikaela Fudolig is a postdoctoral associate working under Professor Peter Dodds and Professor Chris Danforth in the Computational Story Lab. She is working on the lab's newest big project on Ousiometrics and Telegnomics, which are defined to be the study of the essence of meaning and remotely sensed knowledge, respectively. Work done in the middle of the 20th century aimed to quantify meaning through orthogonal dimensions (or "independent" dimensions). Words have been thought to be characterized by three scores: valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD). Over the years, research has mainly been in the direction of finding these scores for a greater variety of words, but the VAD framework has been largely left intact. By re-examining large-scale VAD lexicons, the group has found that the essence of meaning can be further reduced into two dimensions: power and danger. Further, various real-world English language corpora—literature news, Wikipedia, talk radio, and social media—all exhibit a systematic bias towards safe, low-danger words.

Mikaela is studying how power and danger change as one reads through a book, and though she is very busy in the lab, we had the opportunity to ask Mikaela a few questions about herself and clarify some points about her research. See more>>

Soon the University of Vermont will be home to the Food Systems Research Center, to be located in the Joseph L. Hills Agricultural Science Building.

The Food Systems Research Center is a collaboration between UVM and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The Center will focus on understanding the various components of the regional food system, from production to food security, with a special focus on small- and medium-sized farms.

Recently, USDA officials visited the UVM campus. The details of the collaboration and tour are detailed in the UVM Communications article, "USDA, UVM Officials Tour Future Home of Food Systems Research Center."
As the article points out, this is a first and one-of-a kind ARS research unit—designed specifically to study diversified food systems and the smaller-scale farms that contribute to those systems. See more>>

(Photo by Glenn Russell)